Li Hongliang is the distinguished professor of "Cheung Kong Scholar Award" of Wuhan University. His team has been focusing on liver metabolic diseases for more than 10 years. Since 2016, Li Hongliang's team has published 4 papers on Nature Medicine in the field of liver diseases.

After two rounds of investigations up to 9 months, the committee finally made an unanimous conclusion that Li Hongliang's team had not conducted any academic fraud on the related contents involved in the report. There were some negligence in the writing of the papers and Li Hongliang's team has been advised to be more rigorous and meticulous in the future.